Keeping All My Cards Up On the Shelf
by easternepiphany
Summary: Or: Jeff, Britta, and the Year of Secret Sex: A Case Study


See end for notes :)

* * *

It's not supposed to happen like this.

Britta's too old to be squished against the wall in a college dorm bunk bed while some guy tries to unhook her bra. And it's not just some guy, either, it's Jeff fucking Winger. And he's too drunk to get her bra off and there's not enough room for her to reach back and do it herself. And his jeans are already unbuttoned and he's got a wrapped condom hanging out from between his teeth and the bass thumps through the wall and she can hear Annie and Shirley cheering and Pavel could come back at any minute now and

And this is something that happens to people in their early twenties, not people on the cusp of their thirtieth birthday.

But it's happening, it is, and Britta's not going to stop it because when Jeff (finally) gets her bra off his giant hands play her like a fucking fiddle and why is he so good at this?

The Space Simulation Success Party greatly resembles Abed's year-end kegger from last year. Except last year Jeff and Britta were sitting on bunk beds together, not fucking in them. Britta closes her eyes and tries to go back to that moment, before the Transfer Dance, before she made a fool out of herself for no damn reason. But when she opens her eyes she's not back in May. She's in October and Jeff's ripping the condom wrapper and it's more comfortable than the study table but only slightly so.

They're on the bottom bunk and the entire bed shakes and all Britta can think about is the whole thing coming down, crushing them to death, and how it would look when someone found their bodies tangled together, naked, underneath the remains of Pavel's bed.

Does Pavel have a roommate? Whose bed _is_ this, anyway?

Jeff slumps a little bit after he comes, his body pinning Britta's into the mattress. Her shoulder is pressed up against the wall and she runs her hand lazily through Jeff's hair.

"What did we just do?" she murmurs. It's not panicky or remorseful. It's a simple question, one she asks because she's confused as to whether this is a drunken hookup or something weird left over from pretending to be in a relationship last month or… something else she should be able to identify but can't.

He rolls off of her and tries to wedge himself in the remaining space on the bed. It doesn't work and half his body is draped over hers anyway. "What if… what if we're just relieving some stress?" He's slurring his words, just a little bit, but enough to notice.

"Huh?"

"You know. Last year we let all this stuff between us build up until it just exploded. Well, what if this year, we nip it in the bud? Instead of letting it build, let's just… let it go."

She turns her head to face him. It's an uncomfortable angle because she's basically stuck underneath him. Her head is the only thing she can move. "So you want to be friends with benefits?"

"Yes! Exactly. Only, we can't tell anyone else because you know how weird they are."

Britta takes a breath and lets his offer settle over her. She looks for patterns in the springs of the top bunk. There are a million ways this can go wrong. She has a joke at the tip of her tongue, a _Sure, as long as you can stand to not fall in love with me_, but it's too soon for that.

"Okay," she says simply.

* * *

Sometimes they spend entire weekends holed up in one of their apartments, wearing t-shirts and underwear and eating take-out for six meals or more. Sometimes they park in the back corner of the most deserted parking lot at Greendale and climb into the backseat. Sometimes they cut class and close the blinds in the study room and make out on the couches when they know no one will walk in on them.

It's crazy and fun and a little intense. Like when they spend Christmas together on her couch in their pajamas, eating lo mien and getting drunk off eggnog. When they get so drunk that they don't even bother to have sex before they go to sleep and Britta wakes up to find Jeff spooned around her.

She buys him a leather jacket, a ridiculously expensive leather jacket that means she'll be eating ramen and wearing five sweaters to bed for months and months. She wraps it in newspaper, though, so she can pretend it's no big deal and that her heart isn't racing and her palms aren't sweating while he opens it. He sarcastically reads the headlines while he pulls the paper apart but the smirk slides off his face when he takes the lid off the box and lifts the jacket out.

"Oh."

"It's, uh, it's yeah."

He looks at her quizzically and slips on the jacket. It fits perfectly, like it was tailored specifically for him. "Thank you. Really," he says and she smiles.

It looks silly against his sweatpants, though, but she forgets about that when he reaches into the pocket and pulls out a box.

She starts because it's a small box and it looks like there's jewelry inside and every movie and television show she's ever seen has told her to view the small box with a mix of excitement and trepidation. She must have a look of panic on her face because he opens it quickly. "No, it's not—no."

Inside is a piece of paper folded in quarters. Curiously, she pulls it out and opens it up. Her jaw drops and he looks sheepish. "Five _hundred _dollars? In my name? To the _Peace Corps_?"

"Oh, come on, don't act like I don't know how much you spent on this jacket. Look, just—don't make a big thing about this, okay?"

"Okay. Thank you." She nods and closes the paper back in the box. It looks strange on her coffee table among all the magazines and notebooks and unpaid bills. He takes the jacket off and folds it carefully and drapes it over the arm of the couch. They're silent for a moment she pulls her knees up to her chest and smirks at him.

"I bet I can drink more eggnog than you."

The right corner of his mouth inches up and she can see the relief on his face. They always do this, they always have to. It's a stupid and ridiculous drain they have to circle but they do it and he goes to the kitchen and pours a generous amount of bourbon into their eggnog.

* * *

Here's the thing about it: Britta doesn't think they actually become friends until afterward. After they slept together in the middle of the night, after she told him she loved him in front of a couple hundred people and he responded by making out with a teenager, after she didn't speak to him all summer and in the fall they played a ridiculous game of chicken until she finally broke because marrying Jeff Winger? No, thank you very much.

But then they start sleeping together and find themselves with time to kill and fill because they can only have sex so many times in one day. So they talk and she learns the stupid little things about him: how he takes his coffee, the way his eyes look soft and young when he first wakes up in the morning, how he wanted to be a firefighter before he wanted to be a lawyer so he could rescue kittens from trees and babies from burning buildings. They trade movies and music and TV shows and one night he finds her high school yearbook beneath her bed and he stares at her picture, fresh-faced and fourteen. He stares at it for so long that it starts to freak her out a little and she makes a half-hearted attempt at a gross and inappropriate Lolita joke and he closes the book with a tiny smile and his eyes crinkle in the corners and Britta suggests loudly that they go out to get something to eat.

And after a while she begins to be able to make assumptions about him. Not the overhanging assumptions she made when she first met him, like that he's a giant douchebag or that having sex with him would probably be outrageously and begrudgingly great (come on, the guy is like a tree). But assumptions that come from inferences and are things he'd never come out and tell her.

She guesses that he's lonely and has been for a super long time by the way he kisses her like he's drowning and she's air, all hands and desperation. She guesses that his childhood left much to the imagination by the look he gets when he watches movies about kids and their parents, like he wants to simultaneously cry and break something in half. She can imagine the day he got disbarred; the disbelief and resignation on his face, the amount of scotch he drank, the girl he maybe slept with to take his mind off it all, Car Wash Redhead or Juror #6. "I'm a lawyer," he would have told her. Present tense, not past.

She sees his apartment, sparse and impersonal. She sees his car, slick from far away but worn out up close. She sees the way he ignores his mother's phone calls and the guilty look he has on his face as the phone continues to vibrate. She sees all of these things and it's not until February or March does she realize that she actually knows Jeff Winger better than she knows anyone else in her life.

Britta wonders what kinds of things he's learned about her. When she's alone, she pays closer attention to herself. She tries to be an impartial observer of herself and the way she walks around her apartment or drives her car. It's impossible, of course, but even at study group every day she's more conscious of her body and her clothes and the way she holds her pen. He's never looking at her—not while they're with everyone else, anyway—but she still can't help but watch him out of the corner of her eye while he thumbs through his phone and pretends to ignore everyone's conversations.

* * *

The word _boyfriend_ floats into her mind one day and she dismisses it as quickly as it came. It's replaced with _best friend_, which she thinks is more appropriate but still a little terrifying. Britta hasn't had a best friend since she was about twelve years old. There's people she's been close to, but the title is so juvenile because most of the time, there's no meaning behind it. But she spends every single weekend with Jeff and he goes to the vet with her when her cat gets sick and drives because she's too scared and he brings her a sandwich and a cup of coffee when she stays up late working on a paper and he makes an effort not to hog all the blankets, especially when it's cold out. So it's some mix of those words, maybe, but it's not like she can ask him because they're both firmly of the opinion that labels are for squares, man.

They've become comfortable. Too comfortable for Britta, who's used to moving and doing all the time. This is the longest she's been in one place since high school and to have something that could be referred to as a relationship feels constricting and confining and claustrophobic. So maybe one Friday night she doesn't answer his phone call and when he texts her an hour later to see what's up, maybe she replies with _I'm kind of tired, headed to bed early_ and maybe she doesn't invite him to join her. And maybe he gets pissed off and says something like _Whatever, I was just calling to tell you I have a date tonight_ and maybe she knows it's a giant lie and he's sitting in his apartment in the dark watching reruns of TV shows from the 1970s.

Maybe she doesn't go to sleep early but instead stares at the ceiling until three in the morning because she's torn: it's lonely without Jeff next to her but _every_ Friday night? Friends with benefits don't hang out nearly as much as they do. They don't text each other filthy things while sitting next to each other in a room full of people, waiting to see who will break first. They don't have two toothbrushes because remembering to grab theirs on the way out the door was getting to be a pain. They don't have keys to each other's apartments under the guise of "in case an emergency." They don't.

But maybe it's three-thirty now and maybe Britta is tired of overthinking this. Because that wasn't the point. The point was to have fun and release tension and not become this ball of nerves as which she currently exists. Maybe she sighs and grabs her phone off the nightstand and sends Jeff a text that simply says _BCI_. And maybe he replies with _Be there in ten_ and maybe she smiles and gets out of bed and freshens up a little and maybe he's early because he always is and maybe when she finally falls asleep with his arm slung over her stomach, maybe she's still scared about how comfortable this all is but maybe she should be more scared about how uncomfortable it is without him.

* * *

"You told me you loved me in a room full of people," he says one night, malicious, pointed words. They're fighting about something, like he bought sausage pizza instead of mushroom, something stupid and meaningless like that. She could have just picked the sausage off her slice; it wouldn't be the first time.

But this is the one thing he can say to her that hurts her. She's done a pretty good job of forgetting that moment ever happened but every once in a while she'll be falling asleep and it will come back to her, all panic and cold veins. They've never, ever talked about it, not once after their almost-wedding in the study room. And now she just stares at him, slack-jawed, because she still doesn't know what to say. She's not sure how to articulate it, to say that she loved him at the time, lied when she said she didn't, and now she feels like a spool of yarn that's slowly being pulled apart.

Obviously he knows what this accusation does to her, obviously he can see in her face. Because he visibly backs down and turns his face to the floor. "Never mind," he says quietly.

She can still hear her own voice in her head, that small and pathetic "Do you love me?" that haunted her throughout the haze of July when she laid on her bed and stared at the ceiling fan for days at a time.

"No, let's talk about it," she says, surprising herself. "Let's talk about how I was the one who stopped tip-toeing around all that bullshit we pulled for an entire fucking year and told you how I felt and the only thing you could do was walk away like a coward and kiss Annie."

His head snaps back up and his jaw tightens. "What do you mean, how you felt? You pulled that whole thing because you couldn't stand to lose, especially not to someone who dares to be so conventional enough as to have a PhD and a real job."

But she hears what he really means, because that excuse over her supposed jealousy of Slater's degree and teaching position (a PhD and a job at Greendale? Never been too high on Britta's list of goals) is too flimsy to actually work. He means _how can you go back and say you meant it almost a year later_. She knows her slight admission terrifies him and it should, because every single damn thing about Jeff Winger terrifies her.

"You could have stayed," she says finally.

"But I didn't," he says simply. It's not mean or cruel, it's honest.

"But you didn't," she repeats. She picks the sausage off her pizza and the rest of the night is quiet. The silence sounds like the buzzing she heard after he walked out of the dance and she smiled, brave and stupid.

* * *

Britta's cell phone contract expires in March and she scrapes together the money to renew it and when the guy behind the counter asks if she wants to upgrade her phone she says no, thank you and walks out with her old, outdated phone that turns itself off in random intervals and has sticky buttons from that time she spilled Diet Coke all over the keys.

The reason she can't get a new phone, an update, an upgrade is because of that stupid fucking voicemail. Or voicemails, really, because they span over forty minutes, connected through time, saying things Britta in her life had never heard before. Things like "You were sitting on the steps when Abed told me your name" and "You deserve more, so much better, so much more than what I can give you."

These are things he said to her before he knew her inside and out. Before he knew that she's not cut out to be anyone's manic pixie dream girl. That she can't commit to anything, not even things she loves. That her face still, after all this time, still screws up with jealousy sometimes at Annie, that it settles in her chest and attacks her heart. That she's so scared of everything and anything. That she thinks he is the one who deserves better. That she kissed Troy, liked the way he watched her from across the acting classroom, felt powerful being the object of someone's desire.

She still listens to those things he said, sometimes, late at night when he's not around. She pulls the blankets over her head and buries underneath them. She puts the phone on speaker and his voice fills up her makeshift blanket fort and she can close her eyes and pretend that he's there. These things all still make her uncomfortable, months and years later, because the thought of anyone—but especially him—thinking all sorts of wonderful things about her makes her want to hide, to pack her car and her cat and drive as far away as she can possibly go.

"Abed is here and he told me something earlier that I think makes sense. He said that you and I are obsessed with each other because we're both incomplete in the same way. I'm not a good person, Britta. I'm not. I'm thirty-five years old and I go to community college because I lied about everything my whole life. And you're not perfect, either, and that's why I like you so much. Abed's really smart, you know. He's the one who said I should get really drunk and call you. I want you to be complete. Don't be like me anymore, okay?"

One day in the car he's checking his voicemail on speakerphone and her voice fills up the air between them: _Jeff Winger. I am calling you._ He panics and quickly presses the next button but she can't get the self-satisfied smirk off her face.

"Saved it for blackmail," he says. "I'm sure you still have mine for the same reason."

"Oh, yeah," she says. "Same reason."

* * *

They get sloppy eventually. Or, he does. It's almost like he wants the group to catch them. Like not locking the door while they have sex in Abed's bed. Or staying in the study room a hair too long and her shirt is still unbuttoned when Troy and Annie walk in. Or when he makes fun of her sheets in front of everyone and Shirley gives them a look.

"Abed keeps hidden cameras in his room," she tells him with a sense of urgency. "Don't you think we need to break in and steal the tapes?"

He shrugs and turns back to his phone, _tap tap tap_.

"He'll see us having sex in his bed."

"So?"

"So? Then we'll get caught. Everyone will know."

He doesn't answer and she doesn't bring it up any further. If he's not worried, he must know something that she doesn't.

But then she gets to thinking about it, why he's not as militant about what he says, about making up names for dates he has (although: _Gwynnifer_? What kind of fucking name is Gwynnifer?), about hitting on all the girls at Greendale. Why it's suddenly okay for them to drive to school together because isn't she all about saving the environment? Why, when Troy starts looking at her like a puppy dog he puts down his phone and asks her about the Anthropology homework and Radiohead and _anything_, really, to keep her attention to her left and not her right.

Sometimes she feels like: he might be in love with her and it freaks him out so if the group caught them, they'd have to stop having sex and everything would go back to normal and he could forget about her. She thinks this especially when she wakes up first in the morning and slides out of bed to pee and he reaches for her in his sleep. It's such a _Jeff_ thing to do, to try to sabotage everything because he's scared of having feelings.

Don't get her wrong, she's scared, too, and if he ever were to say to her "Let's do this thing for real" she would probably leave a Britta-shaped hole in the door like a fucking cartoon character. But she's also not leaving sex tapes in Abed's video cameras.

(If he did say that, though, she might eventually be persuaded to step back through the Britta hole and say yes. _Might_.)

* * *

Two hours after they agree not to sleep together anymore, Britta finds herself straddling Jeff in the backseat of his Lexus, the windows fogged up like they were on the fucking Titanic or something. How they got here doesn't matter (or so she'll tell herself, because it was actually her that sent the first text message: _I have some of your stuff at my apartment, do you want it?_) but what does, they discuss afterward, is that it can never happen again and no one can ever know.

It's hard to take someone seriously when their pants are unbuttoned and down around their knees, but Britta nods gravely at Jeff's suggestion.

She pulls her shirt on over her head and smiles. "So, uh, I guess I'll see you tomorrow then."

It seems strange because for so many months it was the two of them in a bubble and now it's burst. Now she's going to go home and put all of his things in a box and wash her sheets and sleep alone. She didn't wake up this morning expecting this. She woke up this morning in Jeff's apartment.

"Yeah, we have Anthro tomorrow."

She takes her time zipping up her boots. He opens the door and stands next to the car and she slides out after him. They squint in the sunlight of the mostly-deserted parking lot.

If they were different people, she thinks, if they weren't egomaniacs and full of pretense and incomplete, this wouldn't be a problem because they never would have had secret sex in the first place. He would have asked her out and she would have said yes and if they hit it off, they'd be boyfriend and girlfriend, or whatever the adult equivalent of that is. They'd get engaged at graduation and they'd get married and settle in a house with a white picket fence and he'd be a lawyer and she'd be… something and they'd have two kids named Bridget and Mason and a dog named Sammy.

But they're not normal. That's what it comes down to. They're both the villains of this story, both incredibly self-destructive. In an alternate universe they'd get a happy ending but in this world they get a goodbye fuck in a beat-up Lexus and a night alone in their respective apartments with a giant glass of their alcohol of choice.

"Is it really me?" he asks, tossing his keys from hand to hand.

"You'll figure that out for yourself," she says. With that, she walks away, leaves him standing next to his car. She likes having the last word.

* * *

**Note: **What Jeff paraphrases from Abed in his voicemail is: "You both share that dislike of yourselves. You're equally incomplete, that's why you're equally obsessed with each other." It comes from the Extended Producer's Cut of Communication Studies and is one of my all-time favorite Jeff/Britta-related quotes.


End file.
